


they go along to take your honey

by icarusandtheson



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Fae & Fairies, Fae!Alex, Horror Elements, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Psychological Drama, Resolved Sexual Tension, gw is as always anybody's guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 18:20:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20086660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarusandtheson/pseuds/icarusandtheson
Summary: Alex leaves the house behind, in fragments.[a companion tole beau garçon avec merci]





	they go along to take your honey

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [le beau garçon avec merci](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12653544) by [icarusandtheson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarusandtheson/pseuds/icarusandtheson). 

> special thanks to the anon on tumblr who asked if there was any more content for this au, nearly two years later. apparently, yes.

They’ve been driving through the dark for several hours before George blinks and says, surprisingly calm, “I’m not tired.” 

Alex curls his toes, warm despite the threadbare socks. George has the heating on full blast, which Alex appreciates. George has one hand curled around Alex’s knee, which Alex appreciates more. “Good, because I’m too comfortable to take over yet.”

George arches a brow, unimpressed at the willful misinterpretation. His other hand is firm around the wheel, but not choking it. The truth settled over them miles back, and George hasn’t choked on it. 

“You won’t be,” Alex says. “Not for a while, at least.” George finally looks at him, a question there. Alex tongues his split lip. He’s expecting want, maybe, George’s eyes going dark with it. That much is familiar, a refuse heap of memories picked clean, an old bone pile. 

George’s hand leaves his knee, comes up, and Alex almost flinches, doesn’t, because George’s hand isn’t bone, isn’t anything like memory. Muscle, maybe. A raw, red heart. Alex curls his hands into fists in his lap instead, George’s hand curls around his jaw instead, surprising in its tenderness. 

George runs his thumb along Alex’s bottom lip, careful. “Does it hurt?”

Alex catches the pad of George’s thumb with his tongue, then his teeth. He doesn’t bite to break skin, doesn’t care about debts owed now. Mostly, he’s rankled by the fact that he can’t taste George in his mouth anymore. George’s expression doesn’t change, but his hand is rigid, the whole long line of his body is rigid. Alex thinks of bleeding that tension out, giving George space to breathe in his own body. 

“Sure,” Alex says, and doesn’t bother to not sound pleased about it. George exhales, a low, drawn-out sound, and his hand falls away to wrap around the steering wheel. He presses his thumb hard into a groove in the wheel, and he doesn’t look at Alex’s mouth. 

\---------

They couldn’t stay, obviously. Not that Alex wanted to, after everything. The house wasn’t ever his home, it was just a passingly accurate mimic. 

He thought about setting fire to it, or tearing it apart board by board. It was so small, from the outside. He could have. But it would be the same pointless expense of energy as shattering a mirror instead of leaving the room it was in. It was the same dead anger that kept him coming back, to sit on a floor that didn’t exist anymore and listen to an ocean that was never there. 

He left it as he found it, as empty and as full as it would ever be, to rot away to nothing in the dark.

He pushed George out the door first. Nothing left in the house, nothing left to reflect, but still. Tricking tricksters. Alex didn’t doubt George made a fine lawyer -- and it was _ made, _now, past tense, Alex could still feel his heartbeat in his mouth where George bit him, where he made something new -- but Alex spent his darkest, hungriest moments in this place, in all the places elapsed between his mother’s island to this newer ground, all reflections of the same thing. 

George did it so earnestly it didn’t even smart, at first, but it would have if he stayed. Alex knew that. Whatever pieces of him lingered here wanted the honesty of a torn-open throat, not debate, and George had tricked them, had taken every drop for himself. 

\---------

“How many rooms?” asks the motel clerk, tired and as bored with this line of questioning as Alex is. George doesn’t say anything. Alex has had two fingers curled around one of his belt loops since they walked in. 

The clerk glances at George’s fine clothes, Alex’s cut mouth. If there’s judgement, or pity, or anything but total apathy there, Alex doesn’t catch it, which is probably best for everyone. 

One key. George pays, and doesn’t look at Alex’s mouth. 

\---------

In their motel room, singular -- the room itself, not the experience, which repeats every night they don’t drive through, in places that are and aren’t the same -- Alex is stretched out on the bed when George walks in from the bathroom, an arm tossed over his eyes. He hears George soften his steps, a kindness or the preface to a threat, depending. It’s George, though, so it’s the former. 

“I’m not sleeping,” Alex says, pulling his arm away from his face. The room is bright, and only partially because George is there, three-quarters bare. Alex looks once, takes in every inch of skin, and secrets it away for later. 

George hums, knowing. “I had hoped,” he says. “You should, though.” 

“Do I look that awful?” He meant to grin when he said it. He meant it to be a joke, he thinks. 

“You know you don’t,” George says, faintly chiding, and it’s true, but Alex can’t feed himself on knowing. Besides, he’s trying to avoid mirrors lately, or at least unreliable ones. He trusts George’s eyes. “But you need rest. You do sleep, sometimes; you must have some use for it.”

“I’ve never liked it much,” Alex admits, “even before.”

“There was a before?”

If Alex spends too long on George’s eyes, curious and keen, he might actually give him a straight answer, and then where would they be? He moves his gaze down instead, the damp, clean-shaven angle of George’s jaw, his strong neck -- the crucifix strung around there on a chain, gold and fine and shifting with every breath George takes, every tilt of his head. He never takes it off, even in the shower. Alex wonders, sometimes, if that’s why they’re -- why George is different. Not the necklace itself, that seems too simple, but the meaning behind it. Alex wonders if George could sit in the mouth of a terrible, terrible mirror and walk out again without someone to hold his hand. 

They’ll never know. George did walk out, but Alex was holding his hand, and nobody can prove whose sake it was for. 

When he travels the path back up to George’s eyes, they’re not on him, or at least not on his face -- Alex’s arm instead, flopped back against the bed. Alex is confused for a moment, can’t find anything worth the scrutiny. The bruises are that faded, bare outlines against Alex’s skin. He hasn’t looked at them since the night he met George -- and George probably hasn’t, either. Alex threw out the clothes he wore that night the moment they found a decent enough store, and cold weather has kept him mostly in long sleeves.

He likes this shirt, though, this soft, clinging thing George bought for him because he kept reaching out to touch it absent-mindedly in the store. 

He likes when George gives him things, he’s realizing. Clothes, promises, split lips that taste like him. Alex is incurring a debt he can’t possibly pay back. In another lifetime, he would have choked on it. Now, he can swallow it down almost smooth, if George smiles at him after. 

“You never told me how that happened,” George says, and his voice is careful in a way it hasn’t been since that first time in his car. 

“You think you’re the only one who’s ever offered me a lift?” Alex asks, dry like an old bone. 

George goes silent, the line of him rigid, again. Alex wonders if he was unkind, just now, and shifts over to make room on the bed. George sits; the towel wrapped around his hips is still wet, stray drops of water working their way down the complex topography of George’s bare back. It’s fine; Alex will take that side of the bed, he doesn’t mind the damp spot. 

“It doesn’t hurt,” Alex offers, like an apology, and only then does George go to touch. Gentle, like the skin is still tender. It’s wrong, it’s all wrong, but Alex knows better than to tell him how. 

George looks at him, and his face is calm in the way water is: completely, until it stops being that entirely. At the back of Alex’s brain, a prickle of recognition. 

\---------

“It’s nothing,” Alex tells him later. They pass a tree cut in half by a lightning strike or some other act of some other god, rotting open like a mouth. “The person who did it is nothing, now.” 

\---------

“What did you tell them?” Alex asks, because he didn’t think to, before. George’s laptop across the room, tucked away in his shoulder bag. Alex uses it more than he does, lately. 

“That I was taking a leave of absence.” Alex doesn’t make a sound as he stiffens, and George isn’t looking at him, but he knows, somehow. “I haven’t taken a vacation day for the better part of a decade. If I quit with no warning it would draw more attention.” He looks up from his book, a short story collection he picked up on a whim and reads to Alex when he asks. “Where would I go, Alexander?”

Alex doesn’t have an answer to that, except that he’s hungry and George seems to be waiting on something he can’t guess at. 

George drops his gaze back to his book. He turns the page. 

Alex makes a small _ hm _sound and leaves the room to think. He comes back with junk food from the vending machine downstairs, partly for a passable excuse for leaving and partly because he needs something between his teeth. George is still reading, still in the same place, and it feels exactly as pointed as it’s meant to.

“Those are terrible for you,” George says, like he never licked Alex’s blood out of his mouth. He catches the candy bar Alex tosses at him, and unwraps it, and sinks his teeth in. 

\---------

A diner, somewhere on the side of the road. The woman at the cash has her curls piled up on her head, black ringlets shot through with grey, thin gold hoops that catch the light. There’s a little radio playing behind her, a woman crooning, the occasional burst of static. 

She looks up at him, and smiles. “Do you know it?” she asks, her accent lilting, soft around the edges like the words will blur together given half a chance. 

Alex blinks, automatic. There’s something in his eye. The cashier softens, her eyes warm and crinkling at the corners, and he knows she’s going to repeat the question another way. 

His tongue has to work for the words, has to sift through all the ways he learned to say them first. “Excuse me?”

“You were humming,” George says, his eyes kind. Alex almost flinches. He forgot, for a moment. He forgot. 

\---------

The phone rings. Alex startles at the sound, so used to quiet in the night. George breathing, sometimes snoring, the hum of the electricity threading through the building. George strokes a hand down his flank, murmurs, “Easy,” like his touch has ever been that, and reaches for his cell on the bedside table. “Hello?”

Silence, for a few seconds. George’s hand stays settled on Alex’s hip. 

George says, “Martha,” and the name is gentle in his mouth, worn smooth like a stone from years of history. Alex has a moment to wonder if he should pretend like they both don’t know he’s awake before George makes the decision for him, rising from the bed in one smooth movement.

“I know,” he says into the phone, and again, “I know.” 

There’s a balcony outside the room, if it can be called that. A small rectangle of cement large enough for one person to stand, shift around a little, and maybe allow a second person if they were careful, if they choreographed who went where. George steps out onto it even though there’s nothing to see, stars mostly blotted out by all the artificial light, the twenty four-seven glow of the motel sign flickering and losing a different piece each time. 

Alex sits up in bed; he suddenly can’t bear to be lying down, to be vulnerable. He thinks about what he must look like, half-crouched in the dark like something feral. He thinks about what George would see, if he came inside right now. He swallows around a mouth full of teeth, a mouthful of teeth. 

He hears George’s tone shift at one point, delighted and warm. “Hey, sweetheart --” And then he quiets again, the occasional sound of his laughter floating in through the balcony doors with the breeze. 

Alex’s fingers bunch the sheets. He lets them go, gathers them again because he doesn’t trust his hands, empty. 

\---------

A gas station, somewhere on the side of the road. A little girl half-asleep on her father’s shoulder while he reads the back of a bag of sunflower seeds, pushing her braids back when they fall into her eyes. 

There’s a smile tucked into the corner of George’s mouth as he pays; a memory with meat on its ribs. There’s nothing in Alex’s hands, so he shoves them into his pockets.

\---------

George is asleep, his breathing the only sound in the dark. Alex turns to face him, George’s breath warm on his face. Alex could lean forward, and take George’s lip between his teeth, and be done with it. It’s not what he wants, but he’s used to that. 

There’s a clock in the room. It’s on George’s side, so Alex can’t know how long he lies in the dark, weighing his choices. George stirs, eventually. His hand comes up Alex doesn’t flinch his hand moves Alex’s hair aside and rests against the side of his head. His thumb nudges Alex’s earlobe. If he pressed down, Alex wouldn’t be able to hear anything, just the empty ocean-sound of his own head. 

“Do you want to leave?” George asks, and Alex thinks _ I can’t, _ and then, horribly, that isn’t true -- less formed thoughts after that: teeth, claws digging in, how to hold onto something that’s already slipping. “We can go, if you need to.” Teeth, claws catch on _ we _and ease back into the dark, red parts of him they came from. 

He forgot, for a moment. They’ve been driving through the night more nights than not, Alex’s leg jumping to an arrhythmic beat all his own making; George tried turning on the radio, but it just came out static. 

Alex is finding it increasingly impossible to be still, now. Trying to hurts, lying here in the dark hurts.

His tongue curls around nothing, slow in its remembering. “No,” he says, and turns to face the wall. 

\---------

At some point, George says:

“At some point,” George says, “you’ll have to tell me what it is we’re running from.” 

\---------

Alex sleeps, and dreams of a bright room with an old couch.

\---------

Alex sleeps, and dreams of opening doors until he can’t anymore.

\---------

Alex sleeps, and dreams of sitting on the floor of an empty room and not screaming, the sound of a door clicking shut. 

\---------

Alex paces the floor of the room for hours. George sleeps, then doesn’t anymore, pushing himself up and watching, one arm slung over his knee. He reaches for Alex when he comes close enough, trusts in the inevitability of Alex coming close enough, and catches him, and holds him. Not tightly enough to bruise, but almost.

Alex pulls his arm back, or tries to. George doesn’t shift, his grip doesn’t. 

George says, “Alex.”

George says, “Alexander.”

Alex scoffs, wet. 

“What were the other rooms?” George asks. “The ones you couldn’t show me?”

Silence. Alex doesn’t have to wonder what he looks like, here in the dark; he knows. 

“You talk in your sleep,” George says, which is a lie. Trickster. He’s better at this than Alex is. If the thought of a room without him in it didn’t make Alex want to claw open something vital, he might have to kill him. 

“Let go of me,” Alex says, and it’s animal. Protect the belly, the throat, the heart. George has his fingers curled around Alex’s lifeline; it can’t be allowed. 

George does. In the low light, his eyes are dark and tired and full of pity. He feeds strays sometimes, when they come around for scraps. He looks at them a little like this. 

\---------

Inevitably, this:

Alex walks into a room and the floor shifts under his feet, old carpet to old wood. Where the bathroom was, cracked but immaculately clean tile, the smell of good, strong coffee wafting in. 

Something shifts behind him, and Alex is -- 

Alex is afraid. To turn around, to see what’s there and what it looks like. What if George is gone, what if George is someone else, what if Alex is never going to leave this place --

“Alexander,” and it’s George’s voice, and Alex is relieved and hates himself for it, Alex is disappointed and he hates George for it. He turns, and George is looking at him like a stray, George is looking at him exactly like a stray that he expected to come begging. 

He knew, he saw it before Alex did. When he was asleep? When he was looking at George like he was the only thing in the room, when he made George the only thing in the room? Trickster, trickster, but George only ever meant to be kind with it. 

“I was selfish,” Alex says, which is the truth. “I’m sorry,” he says, which he wants to be. 

George snorts. There’s water pooling around his feet; it smells like salt. “You tried to send me on my way twice.”

“Should have made it three,” Alex says. “You would have gone, the third time.” 

“And gone back to what?”

“Your family,” Alex says. “You love them.”

“I do,” George says, honest, honest, too much to be what Alex thought to make him into, “but they don’t need me.”

“And I do,” inflectionless, Alex is afraid what will happen if he puts too much weight on any one word. “Is that why?”

George is watching him, not wary, but: alert. Alex is circling him. He doesn’t know when he started to do that. His feet are bare, and he moves through the water without making a sound. It feels like dancing. It feels, laughably, like being human. 

“I thought we established that I wanted to be here.”

“Because you want to take care of me.” Like a puppy. Like something he gives food and scratches behind the ear. Alex is going to make a door and open it and behind it, finally, is going to be the room he can scream in. 

Alex’s feet stutter, recover, move on, concentric circles. The same center. George pressing the knife into his hand, in case he couldn’t bear it. George biting the place that would heal the fastest, leave no trace. The kindest option, considering what he had to work with. George giving him food and clothing and shelter from the cold because it was the right thing, George coming with him because -- it was the right thing? 

Alex can’t keep the rooms in his head straight, he doesn’t know which of them George fits into. A bright room with an old couch. An old room with years of dust layered on the heads of martyrs.

The water is up to their ankles; Alex wonders if somewhere inside there is a reflection of him that wants to drown them both.

George tilts his head like he’s trying to see Alex more clearly. “What have you been doing to yourself?” he asks, and Alex does, finally, flinch. George sighs. “What do you need, Alex?” 

“You could still go,” Alex says, honest or reaching for it. “It wouldn’t be the way it was before, but you could go back.” 

George’s brow furrows. His eyes dip to Alex’s mouth, which has healed and somehow still isn’t whole. “I thought,” he starts, and frowns. “I don’t understand.” 

Alex stops. The water is cold, numbing. He flexes toes he can’t feel. “I didn’t eat.” 

“What?”

“There are different ways to do it.” Sitting on the floor of an empty room and not screaming, even when the door clicks shut. “Eating is -- easier, maybe. Or kinder. I didn’t.” 

George doesn’t ask how it happened. Alex wouldn’t tell him if he did -- easier, maybe. Or kinder. 

George watches him, watches his mouth. “Come here, Alexander.” 

“Didn’t you _ hear me,” _animal, animal and awful, the third time, “you can go, you don’t owe me anything anymore, you got me out.” 

“I don’t think I did,” says George, thoughtful. “Come here.” He shifts like he’s going to cross the floor, going to come to Alex, but he doesn’t. The floor is dry under his feet. The floor is carpet. Alex stares at it and it doesn’t move. Alex stares at it and doesn’t move.

“I remember what you asked me to be, and what you didn’t,” George says, and then, “come here,” the third time, and Alex does. He crosses the floor, and it’s dry. 

\---------

The world is, for a little while, the space between George’s neck and shoulder, dark and warm and smelling of soap, and skin, and sunshine. 

George says, “Sweetheart,” and then nothing else. 

\---------

“It doesn’t always have to be blood,” Alex says, after the world is larger again. 

George presses his thumb hard into the groove of Alex’s wrist, and looks at his mouth. 

\---------

George’s mouth is warm, insistent. He doesn’t bite, but his teeth skim Alex’s bottom lip like a sense memory. His fingers skim it like the same, and then Alex opens and swallows around them, and it’s something entirely new. Alex licks the salt off of his skin until there’s nothing left, and wants more. George pulls his fingers out from between Alex’s teeth to curl wet around his throat, just for a moment -- _ later, _Alex thinks, with interest, and lets George lick back into his mouth for a moment before pulling back. 

Alex curls his fingers around George’s belt loops and tugs, says, “Let me,” and wonders if George knows what he looks like, his eyes dark and still like deep water as he pushes Alex onto his knees. Alex mouths the hard length of his cock through the fabric of his pants, hears a rough scrape of sound above him -- it could be a laugh, but it isn’t. George pushes him back, one hand gripping Alex by the jaw, the other working his own pants down past his hips. 

Alex’s throat is bared at this angle. He was expecting a knife, the last time, fighting against animal logic. No knife, this time. Alex and his empty mouth, the easy logic of wanting it filled. 

“You want this?” A memory with meat on its ribs: George pressing the knife into his hand, in case he couldn’t bear it. A door rattles somewhere, but stays shut. 

Alex’s mouth twitches at the corner. “Yes,” he says, and doesn’t bother to not sound hungry as the hand restraining him shifts to cup the back of his skull and presses him forward.

Alex’s fingers curl against George’s thighs, the muscles there straining as Alex puts his mouth on him, tastes salt, tastes skin. 

“Easy,” George says, and it isn’t, particularly, but Alex learns as he goes. Alex swallows around the length of him, and a ragged sound slips out through George’s teeth, wordless. He rolls his hips, fingers curling in Alex’s hair, moving deeper. Alex opens for him, the new ache of muscles learning. Not easy, but good. Wanted.

He pulls back, just once, and finds the absence much worse than the discomfort. 

“Do you want to stop?” George asks, his voice a new and ragged thing that Alex has made, his eyes the darkest part of the ocean. 

“No,” Alex says, and swallows again. Easier, this time. He fits his palm along the warm shape of George’s hip and pushes him forward again, and again, harder than before. 

A fine tremor in George’s muscles, barely perceptible. Alex presses his fingers down into it, fascinated. George’s muscles going rigid under Alex’s hands, and then warmth rushing hot and thick over Alex’s tongue, dripping down the back of his throat. Bitterness coating his tongue, warmth in his stomach.

He suckles gently, draws out the last few drops, thorough since he’s come this far with it, and he hears the sharp sound of George’s teeth snapping together. 

He kneads his fingers against George’s thigh, warm and loose, and then puts his mouth there, because he can, because his mouth already misses George’s skin. Not biting, just holding George between his teeth. 

George says, _ “Christ,” _his hand easing from the wild tangle he’s made of Alex’s hair, and then, “Enough?”

Alex holds still, holds George’s skin and muscle between his teeth. His whole mouth tastes of soap, and salt, and sunshine. 

\---------

“There was an island,” Alex says, a start. George’s chain pressed against his back, George’s chest pressed against his back. In Alex’s mind, there’s a beach with white sand, and an ocean that stretches beyond the horizon. 

**Author's Note:**

> *Thanks for reading! Leave a kudos and comment if you liked it!  
*I'm on Tumblr at [icarusandtheson](https://icarusandtheson.tumblr.com/), come say hi!


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